I spent months lurking on Goodreads before I eventually joined in 2009, but once I did, I was hooked. Money drained from my account and into Amazon's as my reading appetites increased exponentially. Connecting with other "weird" people who loved books as much as I did helped me enormously, having never heard of the term 'introvert' before. I'd finally found my tribe, my people. People who rarely failed to bring a smile to my face and never looked down on me for being a geek. 'Reading' and 'Goodreads' quickly became synonymous with 'freedom', 'escape', and 'relax'.

Paradise, thy name was Goodreads.

I've invested thousands of hours of my free time visiting the site on a daily basis for my fix, and I've always said I'd happily pay a subscription fee to ensure the place I loved preserved the same quality and values it had when I first registered for an account. It's got me through some incredibly tough times and I will be forever grateful for that. It was my safe haven tucked away from the real world, and I believed no one could take it away from me.